Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.

Presidential pot trajectory

1988: A serial liar, bomber, drug dealer, and criminal claims, without any corroborating evidence, that he sold pot to Vice Presidential candidate Dan Quayle. Despite these allegations (which were almost certainly false), the Bush-Quayle ticket wins.

1992: Governor William Jefferson Clinton contends that, while he put a joint to his lips and allow smoke into his mouth, he didn’t inhale. Despite this risible claim (although I do believe that he doesn’t like pot, because not everyone does), Gov. Clinton wins the presidential election.

2008: Senator Barack Hussein Obama is presented to the American people as the second coming of Christ, only with fewer flaws than Christ himself had. Unsurprisingly, he wins the presidential election.

Barry popularized the concept of “roof hits”: when they were chooming in the car all the windows had to be rolled up so no smoke blew out and went to waste; when the pot was gone, they tilted their heads back and sucked in the last bit of smoke from the ceiling.

[snip]

Barry also had a knack for interceptions. When a joint was making the rounds, he often elbowed his way in, out of turn, shouted “Intercepted!,” and took an extra hit. No one seemed to mind.

[snip]

He was a long-haired haole hippie who worked at the Mama Mia Pizza Parlor not far from Punahou and lived in a dilapidated bus in an abandoned warehouse. … According to Topolinski, Ray the dealer was “freakin’ scary.” Many years later they learned that he had been killed with a ball-peen hammer by a scorned gay lover. But at the time he was useful because of his ability to “score quality weed.”

…

In another section of the [senior] yearbook, students were given a block of space to express thanks and define their high school experience. … Nestled below [Obama's] photographs was one odd line of gratitude: “Thanks Tut, Gramps, Choom Gang, and Ray for all the good times.” … A hippie drug-dealer made his acknowledgments; his own mother did not.

These well-sourced claims about Obama are more serious than unsubstantiated allegations against Quayle or risible excuses by Clinton. The question, of course, is whether they will matter as little as the other candidates’ brushes with claims about drug use mattered, or if yet another insight into Obama’s shady, thoughtless, law-breaking, shadowy past will affect how voters view our President.

As for the Romney story, we know . . . nothing. It was advanced by a political operative, the family denies it, the man to whom it allegedly happened is dead, and there’s no corroboration that he was gay or that Romney was motivated by homophobia.

Most people were pranked at school and committed pranks. Most people were not hard core stoners. I know hard core stoners extremely well, although I don’t indulge myself. It’s not an admirable group, nor one that boasts particularly good ethics, even aside from the whole non-law-abiding thing.

Mike Devx

Paul Scott is a prototypical Obama voter. It has nothing to do with who smoked what or who bullied whom. If Romney smoked pot in high school and Obama cut a hippie’s hair as a prank, it wouldn’t matter to me. I wouldn’t pretend that it DID matter either.

Romney’s running a perfectly fine campaign so far, but these are just the early rounds, a lot of not much going on. Their scoping each other out, feints and tricks, a few tentative punches. Let’s wait and see when late summer rolls around, and the big money starts getting spent, and the big punches start getting thrown.

Mike Devx

Would you want a stumbling drunk for a President? George W. Bush was a heavy drinker and partier into young adulthood; but he cleaned up his act after marrying, and so we chalk it up to youthful indiscretion and believe he learned and became wiser. We forgive it. If you’re going to be fair, you have to give Obama the same benefit of the doubt.

The question with Obama is – can you chalk it up to youthful indiscretion? Has he in fact become wiser, and learned to regard that part of his past as a mistake? You read his accounts of also doing cocaine in the book that he wrote (supposedly wrote), and I wonder. Do you see in his writings that he regards that time as a mistake, or merely as illegal fun, no harm done?

It really doesn’t matter to me. His politics and policies are so dreadful he could have grown up pure as the driven snow, and I still would hope with all my heart that the voters turn him out in November.

But if something like this turns off some voters, then I’m all for it. It’s just another data item in their heads, saying “I just don’t want this guy as my President. I can’t trust him anymore.” Add to it the idea that Obama grew up outside America, doesn’t view America kindly at all, and in many ways is just not very American. Consider the fact that he ate dog… and only views it to this day as an unusual and “kinda tough” culinary experience. Whereas most Americans would have been nauseous at the very thought.

The accumulation of these smaller items may pull, say, 5% of voters away from Obama. And if that happens, there’s no possible way he could win.

SADIE

I don’t care that he was a “pot head” …but did he have to turn into a “peckerhead”.

Gringo

The issue with marijuana is much the same as with another psychoactive drug, alcohol: do you control its use, or does its use control you? Obama has already written in Dreams that he was an indifferent student and a stoner when in high school. A friend of his got arrested for drug possession. From Dreams:

I blew a few smoke rings, remembering those years. Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though-Micky, my potential initiator, had been just a little too eager for me to go through with that. Said he could do it blindfolded, but he was shaking like a faulty engine when he said it. Maybe he was just cold; we were standing in a meat freezer in the back of the deli where he worked, and it couldn’t have been more than twenty degrees in there. But he didn’t look like he was shaking from the cold. Looked more like he was sweating, his face shiny and tight. He had pulled out the needle and the tubing, and I’d looked at him standing there, surrounded by big slabs of salami and roast beef, and right then an image popped into my head of an air bubble, shiny and round like a pearl, rolling quietly through a vein and stopping my heart….

Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man. Except the highs hadn’t been about that, me trying to prove what a down brother I was. Not by then, anyway. I got high for just the opposite effect, something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind, something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory. I had discovered that it didn’t make any difference whether you smoked reefer in the white classmate’s sparkling new van, or in the dorm room of some brother you’d met down at the gym, or on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids who had dropped out of school and now spent most of their time looking for an excuse to brawl. Nobody asked you whether your father was a fat-cat executive who cheated on his wife or some laid-off joe who slapped you around whenever he bothered to come home. You might just be bored, or alone. Everybody was welcome into the club of disaffection. And if the high didn’t solve whatever it was that was getting you down, it could at least help you laugh at the world’s ongoing folly and see through all the hypocrisy and bullshit and cheap moralism.

The current discussion on his high school marijuana use made me think that his admission to Occidental was made more on the basis of affirmative action than on his academic achievement in high school. That is not exactly an endorsement of affirmative action: smoke all you want; your skin color will still get you in. [From my math teaching days, I recall a student who was a competent student during first semester. Second semester, total failure. The scuttlebutt was that the difference was pot- as in going to school stoned. I don't think Obama went to school stoned.]

Charlie Parker, the brilliant bebop saxophone player, was also a heroin addict. He died of an overdose at age 34. Some have written that heroin neither improved nor worsened his playing- though it did stop it. He played brilliantly, stoned or sober. The analogy with Obama would be stretched, as coherent thinking requires different skills from playing music.

For all the evidence that pot smoking impedes rational thinking, in looking at Obama, I would say that sobriety is not much of an improvement. I don’t think a pot head could have done any worse in his policies. The Stimulus? If you don’t pass the Stimulus, unemployment will be above 8%. The Stimulus got passed,and unemployment went above 8%. Sounds like something out of Cheech and Chong, not out of the mouths of Ph.D. economists or the POTUS. The Stimulus : eight hundred billions dollars went Up in Smoke.

The good thing about hard core stoners is that they tend to be easily assassinated or killed. They don’t have the common sense to avoid certain things or to put up sufficient security barriers.

http://ymarsakar.wordpress.com Ymarsakar

Gringo, it didn’t go up in smoke. It went into the pockets of people like PS, his Leftist allies at the Green (backed) robber baron corporations, Al Gore, environmentalist lobbyists, and so forth and so on.

It just “didn’t go up in smoke”, however. If only it did, then evil would never have had the funds to do what they have done.

One of the tests in training that I’ve thought about is using alcohol to test whether a student in martial arts have integrated movements and judgment to a degree that does not require thinking. Although it is not meant for a practical course like drunken boxing, it is designed with the intent in mind to test a student’s accumulated knowledge. If they can retain their balance and hand coordination even when their frontal lobes are shutting down due to alcohol inhibition, they are on the road to mastery. By also using alcohol to reduce social inhibitions, we reduce the amount of time a student spends thinking in the emotional part of the brain, the monkey brain, as well, which is a very good thing. It allows a student to focus solely on the survival aspects of training.

I’ve heard several interesting stories that truly conditioned athletes could adhere to football plays whether they were drunk or sober, because they were using a segment of their brains that didn’t require social rules or thought. Integrating martial arts moves as instinct, not emotion or thought, is one of the paramount requirements for mastery.

Libby

Given some of his strange behavior (like referring to his “sons” twice recently), I’m wondering when he stopped smoking pot. Nowadays it’s more acceptable to smoke/have smoked pot than cigarettes. If you ignore his Justice Dept.’s policy on marijuana use, it probably makes him look more hip, which apparently counts with less informed voters. Too bad people like Penn Jillette are calling him out on this hypocrisy.

Simplemind

Given some of his strange behavior (like referring to his “sons” twice recently), I’m wondering when he stopped smoking pot. Nowadays it’s more acceptable to smoke/have smoked pot than cigarettes. If you ignore his Justice Dept.’s policy on marijuana use, it probably makes him look more hip, which apparently counts with less informed voters. Too bad people like Penn Jillette are calling him out on this hypocrisy.

YES that right there is the winner. Think about the weird lapses where he seems completely oblivious to his own faults, unable to give an impromptu speech without the prompter . . . much more.

Folks – JEFF SPICOLI is the President of the US.

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